Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - 2015: A Great Year for Space Exploration

Episode Date: December 29, 2015

Our year-end review features the “best of 2015” lists from Jason Davis, Casey Dreier, Emily Lakdawalla and Bill Nye the Science Guy. What’s Up offers planets, a comet, and a nice prize package for the space trivia contest.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Looking back at the year in space, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. It's our annual year in review show, this time featuring all our regulars, along with special appearances by human spaceflight and light sail editor Jason Davis, and director of advocacy Casey Dreyer. We'll save Emily Lackawalla's greatest hits for the second half of the show, just before we enjoy our weekly What's Up visit with Bruce Fetz.

And we'll begin with New Year's greetings from the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bill, thank you for joining this 2015 review. You are the lead-off batter. It has been a great year, hasn't it? It has been a great year. It's been an amazing year for the Planetary Society and for space exploration writ large. Very recently, SpaceX landed its first stage back on a big concrete landing pad.

And the idea is to lower the cost of getting rockets, getting payloads into low Earth orbit. That's amazing. More importantly, perhaps, the planetary side, he got light sail flying. After 39 years, we got a solar sail spacecraft into space. We brought down that fantastic picture, and that's just the start of things. Next year is going to be higher and cooler. And then we've got a mission to Europa. We've got phase B funding in the U.S. government at NASA to get a mission finally to Europa, the moon of Jupiter with twice as much seawater to the Earth. And my claim, as always,

Matt, is if we were to find life on another world, it would change the course of history. And the Planetary Society, we had our 35th anniversary, a big party. Robert Picardo, you may know him from Star Trek Voyager, is now on the board. I just want to thank everybody. Thank the members. Thank our supporters at the Planetary Society for another wonderful year and really the biggest year since, well, maybe since the Planetary Society began or since 1985 anyway.

So it's a very, very exciting year. And I also want to take this opportunity, since you are thanking our members, to thank our listeners in general for sticking with Planetary Radio for another year. And we hope to keep it up, keep entertaining you and bringing you the best in space news. The best news from space. Yes, thank you for your support. Whenever you're listening to this podcast, everybody,

turn it up loud! Let your neighbors, let other people on the bus or the train hear you. I'm just blasting out of your earbuds. Yeah! Go for it. No, it's exciting. So it's going to be a great year, and thank blasting out of your earbuds. Yeah, go for it. No, it's exciting. So it's going to be a great year, and thank you all for your support. And thank you, Bill. It has been a terrific year working with you,

and I look forward to talking to you over the next one. Thank you. He is the CEO of the Planetary Society. And now we go into a fairly special show, talking to a bunch of my colleagues getting their list of highlights in the universe for 2015. Look him up on the Planetary Society website, and you'll see Jason Davis listed as a digital editor. But that title doesn't do him justice.

Jason is also our reporter embedded in the LightSail project. There's a link to his latest update on the solar sails progress on our show page reached from planetary.org slash radio. But he's also our main correspondent tracking everything related to human and commercial spaceflight. He'll provide the first of our capsule reviews of 2015's biggest space news. Jason, thanks again for joining us on the show. Let's start your portion of this

annual review. Some hundreds of kilometers over our heads with the International Space Station, which had an interesting year. Yeah, it was quite an interesting year for space station logistics. A little more interesting than NASA and its international partners would have liked. We closed out 2014 with the loss of a Cygnus spacecraft that was bound for the ISS with a bunch of cargo. So NASA was already down one commercial crew partner going into this year. Little did they know that this year was going to be even worse. There was the loss of a Russian Progress vehicle back in April, and then a SpaceX Dragon in June. So that set crew supplies back pretty far, so far that during a press conference in November, the subject of toilet supplies actually came up.

So that's not a position you want to be in when you're an astronaut on a long-duration space flight. Literally, literally, yeah. Yeah, but earlier this month, Cygnus finally returned to flight, and that was on a different rocket. They used the United Launch Alliance Atlas V, which is a really reliable ride to space. So they got that cargo flight going again. The Russians are flying Progress again. And then just last week was one of the most exciting moments in the space flight for me personally all year, with maybe the exception of LightSail and Pluto, of course. And that was SpaceX returning to flight, but they did so in grand fashion, launching a communications payload into space. But they also flew the booster back to Cape Canaveral, and that was just wild to watch. Yeah, and I read that lost

in all that excitement, and boy was that thrilling to watch those people celebrate at the Hawthorne plant of SpaceX, there was also this restart of an upper stage. Are you up on that? Yeah, so it was also important for them to show that the upper stage could restart again in orbit, because that's a critical capability if you're sending a payload to a variety of different orbits outside of low Earth orbit. So, for instance, geosynchronous communication satellites, they can require multiple restarts of that upper stage engine. And you're right, that kind of got lost in the excitement as the first stage was coming back to land. And fairly soon, another Dragon capsule on top of a rejuvenated Falcon 9 headed to the space station, right? Yeah, yeah, we should see that as early as February,

depending on how some other things shape up for SpaceX's schedule and a spacewalk that's planned for January. All right, how about that other big capsule, the one that is being built by Boeing primarily for NASA, Orion? Yeah, so Orion, along with its big rocket, SLS, both passed some major reviews this past year. SLS completed its critical design review. That's a huge step for them and revealed its orange paint job. It's going to look a lot like the space shuttle, it turns out, instead of that pearly white Saturn V paint that they were showing us in the artist concepts. And then

Orion, as you said, yeah, they passed one of their milestones to move into the production phase. And with that came some news that they're still on track for the first uncrewed flight in 2018. But now the first crewed flight may not occur until 2023. That could be up to a two-year delay. 2023. That could be up to a two-year delay. But in the meantime, we may see SLS fly a mission to Europa. The SLS has been earmarked now to fly that mission in the new budget. So we may see that interim flight before Orion does the first crewed flight. That would be pretty thrilling. And actually, of course, that came up last week in our conversation with Representative John Coberson, Of course, that came up last week in our conversation with Representative John Culberson, where we talked about SLS, that giant space launch system rocket, and this now mandatory Europa mission.

Pretty exciting. Close us out with a status report on LightSail. It was obviously a big last year, 2015, but 2016 is looking even more exciting. Yeah, yeah, definitely. This was, of course, the big excitement with the successful test mission this past year. But that was only a test to low Earth orbit to a spot where we couldn't actually try out full-fledged solar sailing. So this next flight in 2016 is scheduled to take us high above the atmosphere to about 720 kilometers. to take us high above the atmosphere to about 720 kilometers. And that's just past a portion of the atmosphere where solar sailing can actually have a measurable effect on the sails.

Recently, the entire LightSail team met at the Planetary Society headquarters there in Pasadena, went over some test readiness reviews, and we're ready to start full-fledged system testing in January and February. So in the next couple months, it'll really be a big start to the year for LightSail in terms of testing. Then it'll be shipped off to Georgia Tech for integration into its carrier spacecraft, which is Prox1. Jason, I look forward to talking with you in more depth about LightSail as these developments unfold. And with other folks as we lead up to that big launch, we'll note, of course, on the tip of a Falcon Heavy rocket from SpaceX. Thanks so much.

Yeah, thank you, Matt. Planetary Society Digital Editor Jason Davis. We'll go now to Director of Advocacy Casey Dreyer. We also heard from Casey last week when he introduced us to NASA's 2016 budget. By the way, my extended conversation with Casey about that subject is still available. You'll find it at planetary.org slash radio. Just scroll down a bit. Casey's latest blog entry explains the two-year delay in the expected launch of InSight, the next Mars lander. Casey, good to have you back for a second consecutive week as we look to you for

your list of highlights of 2015. Let's start with the one that we heard about so much last week from you and Representative Coberson, and that's Europa. Yeah, I mean, I can't overstate, I think, the importance of having Europa as a mission. It's in the pipeline, right? It is begun. And not only has it begun, has NASA formally embraced the mission, and we have a team, we have a science team, and they're, you know, designing the thing right now. But it's also U.S. law that we have to go to Europa. That's a pretty big step from last year at this time, in that we had no Europa mission on the books. So we've gone from nothing to it's breaking the law not to go to Europa right now. So there's a big milestone. Let's go out to Mars.

Yeah, so this is going to be, I'm going to toss this one out as my kind of fun one, which was we had the announcement this year of the discovery of basically water, briny water flows on Mars. People kind of complain every now and then that NASA, you know, discovers water on Mars every couple of years. And yeah, sure. But this news, when this came out, this was huge. You can look at this in Google Trends. The amount of people searching and reacting to this news was bigger in terms of a spike than the Pluto news was. It's a huge news story. And I think it's

a great reminder for all of us sometimes who get jaded following stuff in the space business, that Mars and particularly the idea of looking for life on Mars, which is what we want to do with not just Mars 2020, but the sample return part, and also with astronauts going to Mars. This really, I think, sums up to me, This was the year that NASA is starting to get really serious on Mars, and it's a great reminder that the public is very, very excited about Mars as well. And plus you had The Martian all mixed in there, the movie The Martian, which just did huge numbers in the box office. Mars is hot.

That's going to be one of my big things. Mars is hot this year. Mars is hot. Let's go on to something that we haven't talked about at all on this show. And I may have to get somebody from, oh, let's say an asteroid mining company to talk about it. And that's this commercial space bill that passed. Yeah, that's a really important one. It's a little out of our bailiwick here at the Planetary Society. But just from a big picture part of where space is going, the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act

passed. It actually had a bipartisan agreement, passed legislation through the Senate and the House. Goodness, you know, surprise. And it was very good. Extended the space station in 2024. It gave a certain amount of property, not necessarily rights, but property ownership for people who would otherwise be mining asteroids or other resources in space. Indemnified people from launch accidents being liable for this. Really good stuff for the commercial spaceflight industry to help it grow and help it really develop in the next 10 years here. And so really nice bill. Very much a lot to like in there.

A good example of bipartisan people coming together in a bipartisan way to work to advance space exploration. Very nice bill. Yeah, you should definitely have someone come on and talk about it. It's a lot of interesting stuff in there. But that was a very important piece of legislation to pass this year. I will do that. And we still have about 30 seconds left for you to remind us of even more good news, the NASA budget. Yeah, I mean, come on.

There's so many good policy things in there. I would say the one thing to take away is this is pretty much the third year in a row that Congress has given NASA more money than the White House has requested. Congress is going out of its way to give NASA more money. That extra money means that when we're asking for more money for planetary science or for exploration or for Mars, that we're not taking it away from anybody else. We're growing the pie and everyone is going to win. And I think that the White House should take that advantage and see

that, look, Congress has fallen over itself to give money to NASA, run with that, ask for more next year, keep these increases going to build the kind of program, support the program we as a nation and the world are asking NASA to do. It was a great budget, a lot of good stuff for NASA in there, and I hope it continues next year. That's Casey Dreyer, our Director of Advocacy at the Planetary Society, and we'll visit with him, I'm sure, several times in the coming year. Happy 2016, Casey. Same to you, Matt. Always a pleasure. Our review of 2015's biggest space news continues in a minute with Emily Lochte Walla. This is Planetary Radio. Hi, I'm Andy Weir, author of The Martian. Do you know how my character, Mark Watney, will make it to Mars someday?

He'll get there because people like you and me, and organizations like the Planetary Society, never stop fighting to advance space exploration and science. The challenges have rarely been greater than they are right now. You can learn what the Society is doing and how you can help at planetary.org. Mark and I will thank you for taking steps to ensure humanity's bright future across the solar system and beyond. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here. I'd like to introduce you to Merk Boyan.

Hello. He's been making all those fabulous videos which hundreds of thousands of you have been watching. That's right. We're going to, which hundreds of thousands of you have been watching. That's right. We're going to put all the videos in one place, Mark. Is that right? Planetary TV. So I can watch them on my television? No.

So wait a minute. Planetary TV's not on TV? That's the best thing about it. They're all going to be online. You can watch them anytime you want. Where do I watch Planetary TV then, Mark? Well, you can watch it all at planetary.org slash TV. Welcome back to Planetary Radio's annual look back at the year in space. I'm Matt Kaplan. Of course, we're presenting no more than a few selected highlights from around our own solar system. There are billions and billions of galaxies we won't mention,

along with important and exciting discoveries about stars, black holes, the origin of the universe, and our growing knowledge about how planets are formed. We won't even have time to talk about all the planetary missions underway in our neck of the galactic woods, so caveat emptor, space fans, but it's hard to knock the great reporting on planetary science by senior editor Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, you normally start the show off. Today, we close out, at least leading into Bruce, with your review of 2015. Where would you like to start?

Well, I'd like to start with small worlds in the solar system. Actually, it's going to be my theme for this whole segment, I think, because there were an awful lot of them that were explored this year. Ceres was the first of those. Ceres is the largest asteroid in the asteroid belt. It's so large, it's round, which makes it a dwarf planet. And it's really quite different to anything that we've ever explored before with a spacecraft. So Dawn approached in March and finished global mapping in March and was able to produce our

first ever map of this world. And by now, toward the end of 2015, is at its low altitude mapping orbit, and is going to focus in on some of those intriguing bright features and dark splashes and grooves and craters and all kinds of interesting things that they found on Ceres' surface. I've read some interesting speculation about those famous bright spots. A lot of people have been doing an awful lot of speculation. Of course, the scientists are always somewhat circumspect. And there were two main ideas that they were checking out. Either it's ice, which wouldn't be stable over the long term in the asteroid belt, but we know that Ceres is made at least partially of ice, so that was conceivable. Or salt, which you would expect if there were some kind of briny lower layer, even it doesn't

have to be liquid today, it could have been liquid in the past. You might concentrate salts and then an impact in the right spot could expose them at the surface. And it looks like that's what they're favoring now. Let's go out to that other, much more distant dwarf world, the coverage of which sort of dwarfed the coverage of Ceres. I'm afraid it did. Yeah, Pluto took most of the headlines this summer. It made quite a splash, as well it should, because it was really dramatically exciting, interesting world to explore. Plus the bonus of the amazing moon Charon, which looks to me like a moon of Uranus, maybe. It's got these fissures across its surface and smooth plains, probably cryovolcanic. It's got the red cap on the top of it. So I think personally, Charon, to me me is nearly as interesting as Pluto. But Pluto has all these fabulous landscapes, different kinds of mountains

in that cellular terrain in the heart of Pluto that doesn't appear to have any craters, which means it's geologically young. And then just the amazing images that New Horizons took as it flew past where we could see the mountains silhouetted against the sky, and the sky itself is filled with multi-layered hazes, and the mountains cast shadows on the hazes, and there's ground fog, and it's just, that's probably one of my favorite images from space of all time. Oh, I couldn't agree more, and it certainly has been a great year for Alan Stern and the whole New Horizons crew. How about another body, one that was a particular success for the European Space Agency? Yeah, so now we're going to a much smaller scale.

We're talking about the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which Rosetta entered orbit there last year in 2014. But this was the year that Rosetta saw the comet pass through perihelion. When the spacecraft first arrived, the comet wasn't particularly active. And over the course of the year, as the comet got close to the sun, it just started jetting and jetting and jetting. And it just made this absolutely spectacular view. The comet's instruments have been picking up all kinds of fascinating gases and dusty materials and learning about the origins of the solar system. That mission is going to continue producing throughout the next year. And then eventually in September of 2016, they're going to land on the surface of the comet. Speaking of jets, I think there's one more of these small worlds you want

to talk about. Oh, yes. So Enceladus is just as exciting as any of these, even if it doesn't orbit the sun on its own. It, of course, orbits Saturn. But Cassini did three very close flybys of Enceladus right at the end of 2015. And those are pretty cool because the south polar jets are actually in permanent winter shadow right now. And so they were able to use Cassini's heat sensing instruments to directly measure the heat of the vents without any interference from solar heating. And that's science that hasn't been completed yet. So we can look forward to the results of that work in 2016. Wow. And as we heard from John Culberson last week, he wants a mission to Enceladus, just as he has also made sure that it looks like anyway, we're on track for missions to Europa.

Let's go to one more world. I don't think we can finish this segment with you without at least a short visit to the red planet. Yeah, of course, there's an awful lot of spacecraft active at the red planet and especially the rovers. Opportunity finally reached Marathon Valley, is exploring the clays that they saw from orbit. And Curiosity, too, finally reached the rocks that the mission was sent to Mars to explore. It's been really exciting this year, watching Curiosity finally get going, doing the style of science it was sent to Mars to do, exploring Mars from this mountain from the bottom up, layer by layer, reading Mars' history like a book. And I just really can't wait to see what they accomplish in the next year. In the meantime, right around the new year, they've been exploring these gorgeous black sand dunes,

and the pictures are even more amazing than usual. So much to look forward to. And Emily, I very much look forward to all of the conversations we will have in the coming year. It's my pleasure to thank you each week for these. And I get lots and lots of letters from listeners who want to say the same. On their behalf, we're all grateful. And have a great new year. I will.

And I want to thank all the listeners for listening. That is the senior editor for the Planetary Society, our planetary evangelist. She is also a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine and increasingly seen elsewhere around the media world. That's Emily Lakdawalla. We're going to go into now the other person who really has been around every single show since the beginning more than 12 years ago. That's Bruce Betts. He'll be here in a moment with What's Up. We close out this last episode of Planetary Radio for 2015, at least as we produce it. Probably for many of you, it's your first episode of 2016. But regardless, here is Bruce Betts with What's Up.

He's the director of science and technology for the Planetary Society. Happy 2016. Happy 2016. Happy 2016, Matt. You have lots to tell us about in the night sky. Go for it. All right. We've got in the evening sky, Mercury making an apparition low in the west shortly after sunset. In the pre-dawn sky, we still have four planets lined up going from lowest to highest in the pre-dawn east. You've got Saturn followed by Venus, followed by Mars, followed by Jupiter. And on December 31st, the moon will be hanging out near Jupiter, making for a lovely sight.

We also have a comet hanging out in the sky, although it's going to almost certainly take binoculars or a camera with a long exposure to view it. Coming in at sixth magnitude, we've got Comet Catalina C-2013 US. You, you, yeah, whatever. Comet Catalina. Busy sky. Comet would be cool to see. Catalina. Busy sky. Comet would be cool to see. On to this week in space history. It was 1801 that Giuseppe Piazzi discovered Ceres.

Became a planet, and not a planet, and an asteroid, and a dwarf planet, but now dawns to him. It's cool, no matter what. Yeah, wouldn't he be proud of his not-so-little world today? He would indeed. Alright, we move on to Random Space Fact. In honor of the change to the new year on Earth, let's talk about years on other planets. We go

from the shortest year in the solar system at Mercury of 88 days, Go out to Neptune, that's 59,800 days in a year. That's about 165 years. And out to Pluto, you're at 90,560 Earth days in a year, or about 248 years, Earth years, that is. That's impressive. And I wonder, for, you know, the most distant object so far on the Kuiper Belt must be, like, what, double Pluto? Well, it depends. There are objects that are much longer. And you go out to those long-period comets, they can be millions of years. But, yeah, we'll get back to that in the trivia contest for one object that's of interest. Let's go on to trivia. We asked you when we were standing on a sand dune what four bodies in our solar system

are known to have sand dunes. How'd we do? Okay, I have to apologize here because I messed up. I didn't update the contest question online until like two, three days later. It just completely slipped my mind with, you know, the holidays, I guess.

I'll blame that. So we had a somewhat smaller but still substantial number of entries. According to random.org, though, our winner this week is Robert Linden, a first-time winner in Vancouver, British Columbia, who said Earth, Mars, Venus, and Titan, correct? That is correct. Titan actually has lots of sand dunes. Yeah, in fact, we heard, I think, from Heather Murray in Nixa, Missouri, that Titan has the most, like 15% of that little world,

that moon, not so little moon, is covered by sand dunes, and only 2% for Earth. But, Robert, you are our winner. Congratulations. You're going to receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt and a set of 2016 Year in Space desk and wall calendars. And so congratulations on that. We're very happy to award those.

We had a lot of people who, for whatever reason, nominated Pluto as one of the four. This one from someone who was less sure but wanted to bet 10 space dollars that Pluto has some kind of dune formation. That from Nadim Abu Hashmi in Reseda, California. Do you think there's any chance of that, dunes on Pluto? I got stuck on space dollars. Yeah, is there any chance of those existing? There are things that look vaguely dune-like, but they're probably ice-like features. I suppose it's possible, but it's an awfully thin

atmosphere to generate any type of true sand dune, wind-blown, aeolian features. Little tiny sand dunes. Little millimeter-sized sand dunes. Oh, they're so cute! We also got a lot of votes for Arrakis.

But the best nomination came from Daryl Gardner for Other Worlds Around Our Galaxy. He included Arrakis, also Tatooine, Druidia, and Vulcan. Torsten Zimmer would have added Jakku.

Have you seen Star Wars yet? No, quiet, no spoilers. Would you please go see the movie? I really want to. It's so hard for me to go out when people recognize me, I get mobbed. Disney is waiting for your money, okay? They've only made a billion so far. All right, we're ready for next time.

Speaking of things with really long years or orbital periods around the sun, what is the orbital period, the length of a year for Sedna, the odd object that's in a highly elliptical orbit, way out there in the solar system? Sedna year. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. That is so interesting because people are going to think that I knew where you were going and I did not because, of course, I never know where you're going. You claim you like that.

We just somehow get there together. You have until the 5th of January 2016, January 5th at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this particular answer. Well, your prize, if you get it right and you're chosen by random.org, will be a Planetary Radio t-shirt, a 200-point itelescope.net account, that's worth a couple hundred U.S. dollars for that international nonprofit network of telescopes, and the year in space desk and wall calendars. That is quite a prize package there, Matt. Isn't it, though?

Isn't it, though? And we're already past the holidays. We're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about what spiffy things in space you're looking forward to seeing in 2016. Thank you, and good night.

I'm looking forward to continuing to talk to Bruce Betts. Thank you for doing this every week, and I look forward to keeping it up for another year. He is the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us each week here on What's Up. With that, we end our all-too-brief review of 2015 and this week's show. We're very, very glad to have you with us, and we look forward to bringing you another 52 journeys across our solar system and beyond in the new year. Speaking of

beyond, and I mean way beyond, here's a plug for The Looking Planet, a 17-minute animated film that will knock your eyes out and leave you in a state of entertained wonder. You can see it for free at thelookingplanet.com. That's thelookingplanet, all one word, dot com.

Let me know what you think. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its members. Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle created the theme music. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear New Year's skies.